56 The Botanical Gazette. [February, 
to the collection. Young Bebb seized upon these with 
g 
avidity, for before this, as he himself says, he did not know 
that there was such a thing as a text-book or introduction 
to the study of the science, with a key by which the young 
student might trace the genera and species, and learn some- 
thing of their relationship. 
Mr. Bebb was about sixteen years old at this time, and by 
these valuable acquisitions, an added impulse was given to 
his pursuit. He quickly found the key to families and 
enera. He had never seen anything like it before, and 
then for the first time he recognized its use and its value. 
Here was order and system. ‘‘Going out into the garden,’ 
he says, ‘‘I broke off a branch of a native shrub the common 
name of which was familiar, and easily traced it to Viburnum 
Lentago. This threw me into a perfect fever of excitement. 
I rushed out for fresh material with which I was equally suc- 
cessful.” The way was now clear, and he quickly became 
familiar with every tree, shrub and herb about him. He 
started a little herbarium on sheets of quarto size, preparing 
the specimens as nearly as possible like the plates in the 
books he was studying, and drawing on the sheets the flower 
and fruit analyses. He had no idea that a fruit of any size, 
such as that of Echinocystis, could be pressed. We must not, 
indeed, despise the day of little things. From this small be- 
ginning and as a direct consequence of it, sprang the splendid 
herbarium of later years. 
In the meantime Mr. Bebb’s father had become actively 
engaged in polities. Inthe presidential campaigns of 154° 
and 1844, he figured prominently as a zealous Whig, and 10 
1846 he was nominated for governor of Ohio on the Whig 
ticket and elected by an overwhelming majority. Governor 
Bebb declined, however, a second nomination and decided 
to withdraw from public life. Purchasing a tract of land em- 
bracing five thousand acres in the Rock river valley, in Win- 
nebago county, northern Illinois, one hundred miles north- 
Michael, at this time a boy of seventeen years 
ful vigor and enthusiasm, took quite a different course. 
assisted his brother-in-law in driving a herd of Short-horn cat: 
